Monday, September 24, 2007

Indie musicians should check out IndieKazoo

INDIEKAZOO, a new service created to help independent musicians derive the full financial benefit out of selling their music on the Internet, has just been launched. In introducing the service, its founders, Kenneth Feldman of KPF digital and Eric Schwartz of Cactus Media, pointed out that the major existing download services take 30-40% of the artists' sales revenue and keep them waiting up to 90 days to receive their money.
"It's robbery, plain and simple," said Feldman. "There are a few big services out there that dominate the field, and they're taking unfair advantage."
INDIEKAZOO's concept is to provide artists with their own music download store where they can sell their music directly to their fans and receive 100% of the sales revenue. Artists follow simple instructions for uploading their music - whether entire albums or single tracks - creating their "store," which can be integrated into their own website if they have one, or be a stand-alone page hosted by INDIEKAZOO.
Unlike the big services, INDIEKAZOO lets them set their own prices and/or offer special promotions or features. And most importantly, INDIEKAZOO lets them receive 100% of their sales revenue, charging only a small monthly fee.
Another unique feature is that artists receive proceeds from their sales instantly - or as Schwartz likes to say, "You can pay for dinner tonight with the sales you made today."
The idea for INDIEKAZOO grew out of work the pair had done for several musician friends. They built custom-made download stores for the musicians' websites, where fans could purchase and download music directly from the band. But each "store" had to be individually installed.
INDIEKAZOO's founders asked themselves: "What if there was a way that ANY independent musician or band - with no web skills at all - could create their own full-service music download store just by following some easy instructions?" And even better, "What if this store let these musicians receive all the sales revenue?" The result is INDIEKAZOO.
One of the clients who has already signed up with the service is Greg Page, former lead vocalist and founding member of the Australian band The Wiggles, who now sells his own solo music on INDIEKAZOO (http://www.indiekazoo.com/gregpage).
New York City percussion ensemble Mecca Bodega was one of the first groups to start using INDIEKAZOO to sell music directly to their fans online.
"Things have really changed in the music business," remarked Paul Mueller, one of the band's leaders. "We saw early on that this is the way of the future for independent bands." (http://www.indiekazoo.com/meccabodega)
Full information about INDIEKAZOO is at http://www.indiekazoo.com./

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mickie, thanks for posting our press release.

There are so many independent musicians out there with so much great music; we just want them to be able to sell their own music on the Internet themselves.

That's why we created IndieKazoo.

Thanks again for the mention on Mickie's Zoo! Hey, we have the same "last name!" :-)


Kenneth Feldman
Co-founder, IndieKazoo

Mickie said...

Hello Kenny! I like your ideas and I wanted to make my musician readers aware of this opportunity. I wish you and my readers lots of success with IndieKazoo. Keep on rockin' Mickie